A report from my friends, respected political scientists Gad Horowitz and Shannon Bell of radicalgeneralsemantics.net, on their recent visit to India teaching on behalf of the Balvant K. Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences. I'm happy to have had some responsibility for getting them over there from their base in Toronto, Canada; I recommended Gad as a wonderful korzybskian resource when I went to India earlier this year, to present at the General Semantics VI National Workshop in Jaipur and other venues, including an Advanced National Workshop on General Semantics:
The Event of Radical General Semantics 2013
in
Baroda, Rajkot and Mumbai
by Shannon Bell
Gad
Horowitz’s lecture “Levinas: A New Ethical Orientation,” the third in the Balvant
Parekh Distinguished Lecture Series,
set the tone for the four day General Semantics VII
National Workshop: The Spirit of Democratic Citizenship (Radical General
Semantics) Department of English & CLS, Saurashtra University, Rajkot November
13-16. The following quote
from Gad’s Levinas lecture provides an ethical imperative directing the skills
and techniques of General Semantics: “The plea of the other COMPELS a response,
not politically, rationally, or with force but ethically; there is no way of
not responding. Obligation happens here together with every kind and degree of
response. It is only in responding to the other that I am constituted as a
responsible human agent, no matter to what degree I assume my responsibility.”
Gad began the Rajkot
workshop: “I would like to begin by invoking the names of Mahatma Gandhi, who
attended high school in this city, Shri Balvant Parekh, the great patron of
general-semantics in India, and Alfred Korzybski, the founder of the
general-semantics movement.”
He immediately set out what
he means by coupling radical with general semantics: “GENERAL-SEMANTICS is not
just one ‘human science’ among others. It was founded as a movement aimed at
advancing human civilization by way of a radical transformation of its basic
grammatical-cognitive-affective structures, which is why I teach it as
‘radical-general-semantics’. It is not merely one critical theory among others
but a set of PRACTICES, of the kind that Michel Foucault called ‘practices of
the self,’ which can and should be learned and internalized to some extent,
‘neuro-semantically,’ by every human being beginning in childhood.”
The format we followed for
each of the four days was first viewing one of the eight video lectures by Gad
(there are 22); the video was shown for 15-20 minutes, then I as manager of
radicalgeneralsemantics.net, workshop resource person and videographer, would
recapitulate central points, ask questions to which Gad himself would respond,
followed by interaction from participants. Then again 20 minutes of video followed
by the same process. We viewed two video lectures per day covering the
following themes: event, object, label levels, structural differential, spiral
circularity of human thought, non-elementalism; the devices of general
semantics—index, multi-ordinal index, date, chain index, etc., quotes and
hyphens—and levels of self. What
impressed me as moderator was the sophisticated placing of English Literature
and Indian Philosophy into the large frame of General Semantics by several of
the workshop’s senior participants; this included using the event, object,
label levels and devices of General Semantics in literary textual analysis. On day two we assigned the task of focusing
attention on a natural object and describing it carefully in sensory-specific
language, for example, the description of a so-called “banana” might begin with
the words “a yellow elongated object turned up at both sides something like a
crescent.” Among the participant’s numerous responses shared the next day was
the beautiful description of a pear from Yann Martel's novel Beatrice and
Virgil read out by Dr. Ravisinh Zala
from the Department of English & CLS.
To ensure that the
first-time practitioners of
General Semantics were understanding the formulations, we began each morning
session with written questions from the participants; the questions ranged from
defining such terms as intensional, extensional, non-aristotelian, silent level
practice, semantic blocks to questions of a more philosophical nature, such as,
‘what is meant by the “spirit of democratic citizenship”’ and questions of a
more practical nature, such as, ‘how will silent practice help in a student’s
study life, particularly in reading?’
Saurashtra University lived
up to its well-deserved reputation for hospitality complete with the excellent
catering service of Parthil Caterers, a tour of Rajkot that included Alfred
High School which Mohandas Gandhi attended and the Rama Krishna Temple, a
closing dinner on the rooftop terrace of Hotel Sarovar Portico, and a wonderful
lunch just for Gad and me at the home of the Head of the Department of English,
Dr. Kamal Mehta and Madame Mehta on our last day in Rajkot.
Our two-day General
Semantics workshop at the Sir JJ School of Art (November 18 and 19) with the
students in Ms. Snehal Tambulwadikar’s class “Art History and Aesthetics” was
equally invigorating for us. Here we were teaching General Semantics to
newcomers to the field who also happened to be artists. Art was placed in the
context of General Semantics and what a perfect context in which to do so – a
studio surrounded by forty-some paintings produced by the students attending.
On Day 1, after a superb
introduction to General Semantics presented by Dr. Deepa Mishra, Director of a
Nodal Centre for General Semantics, Smt CHM College, Gad offered an overview of
the main points of General Semantics—structural differential, silent practice,
the devices. Several of the art students participated very actively; reference
was made to their paintings in the context of the structural differential and
object and label levels.
Day 2 began with Gad linking
the skills and techniques of General Semantics with Miksang Contemplative
Photography http://www.miksang.org/m/index.html and the work of the American artist Charles
Biederman, himself a student of General Semantics, http://www.charlesbiederman.net as foreground to Shannon Bell’s work on Shooting
Theory. Shannon showed six of the
twelve films she has made bringing
together digital video technology and print textual philosophy/ theory through
imaging philosophical/theoretical concepts. The films shown were Edmund Husserl
Blind Residuum Caves https://vimeo.com/21341729, George
Bataille and Simone Weil – Beautiful
Waste: Dead Sea Sinkholes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDtr_8n54Cg, Emmanuel Levinas – Shooting the Elemental https://vimeo.com/42109865, Walter Benjamin – Flâneuring Ancient Arcade Ruins https://vimeo.com/46174007, Martin Heidegger – Flashes of Perception https://vimeo.com/71183979, and Samuel Mallin – The Sinuous Turn https://vimeo.com/77701915 . Shannon
located imaging theoretical concepts in the broader General Semantics framework
of just seeing (pure object level) and seeing as (the level of labeled
experience).
We were very pleased to have
in attendance at the workshop Sir JJ Dean Vishwanath D. Sabale, Dr. S. Kahn -
Director of a Nodal Centre for General Semantics and Ms. Kavita Nimbalkar - Administrator
of Corporate Social Responsibilities for Pidilite Industries Ltd.
Aside from the dynamic JJ
School of Art workshop, other highlights in Mumbai included the Grand Hotel
(where we stayed) view of the industrial port, attempting to drive to Juhu
Beach precisely at the time of the sunset water puja just after Diwali and then
a walk on Juhu Beach the following day (thanks to Pidilite’s generous hospitality
we has the pleasure of being driven here and there by Gajendra by far the best
driver in Mumbai), a trip to the Gateway of India during a Jain festival,
passing through the crowd to make our offering at the Shree Siddhivinayak
Ganapati Mandir Ganesh Temple, skywalking on the Bandra skywalk, repeated trips
on the Sea Link, lunch at Café Madras (don’t leave Mumbai without eating at Café
Madras) and then on our final day a visit
with Dr. Prafulla Kar to Pidilite Corporate Office to meet and have lunch
with Shri Balavant Parekh’s two sons—Madhukar and Ajay Parekh—and Balavant
Parekh’s brother Narendrakumar Parekh.
Our discussion touched on Radical General Semantics (Gad had sent his
introduction to the Rajkot workshop to the Parekh’s before our meeting);
vibrant reminisces of their father and brother’s involvement with General
Semantics, their respective experiences attending University of
Wisconsin-Madison and Berkley University and ours teaching at University of
Toronto and York University; we met many of the staff and had the pleasure of
being part of the weekly birthday lunch in which whoever of the 1000 employees
has a birthday that week is invited to lunch with the CEOs. We have a copy
signed by all three Parekh’s of the Felicitation Volume, Behind the Curtain, presented to Shri Balavant Parehk on the occassion
of his 75th year. Of all the essays documenting a life of endeavor,
mindfulness and generosity the most precious to me is “He Has Very Deep
Interests in Many Subjects” by Kanta Parekh (his wife). She jokingly calls him “over-wise” due
to his interest and expertise in many subjects – “Psychology, Politics,
Science, Gujarati literature, Medicines, etc.” (278)
Walking with Dr. Kar and Gad
in The Hanging Gardens and overlooking Marine Drive and the Queen’s Necklace
from Kamala Nehru Park shortly before leaving Mumbai, I wondered if Balavant
Parekh use to walk here when he was poor and starting out and also when he
became one of India’s leading industrialists and philanthropists. He did. One
of the essays in Behind the Curtain writes about the older
Parekh spending time walking and talking with leading Gujarati and Indian poets
in the Hanging Gardens. After all, as Gad said in the Rajkot workshop as he
directed us to walking as a silent practice: ‘walking is a sacred obligation’.
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